Life & Like 'correcting' prices???

[Topo]

Recently, I have eard a lot of fuss about Life & Like correcting -at high- their MRSP on to-be-released items as the GP18s and GP60s.
Some LHS have complained that they already had a lot of pre-orders with pricing based in the previous MRSP, and now they were left with the issue of:
1) eating the increase off their margin (not a good fix)
2) traslate the increase to the customers that had the items pre-ordered (no comments...)
3) go 'salomonic' (cut off part of the increase from their margins and traslate the rest to customers).

I don't know the real dimension of it, but it don't seems to me a wise bussiness practice this.
If you left the final customers with the feeling of have been 'toasted', and the distributors/dealers take all the flak (in their wallet and in their ears) for the increases, soon the people (LHS and modellers) will choose not pre-ordering items from these manufacturers, prefering instead to 'wait and see'.

Only my point.

 

[billk]

I haven't heard of this, but it looks like the dealers and distributors are being put in a no-win situation. LifeLike will feel the backlash in the end, but in the meantime, the hobby shops and distributors will also feel the heat.

I'm sure that at least some of the pre-orders are prepaid, in what the buyer thought was "in full", and in those cases the seller is in a real bind. And of course there's sure to be a few sellers that will add more $ to the price than LifeLike's increase.

 

[MasonJar]

I don't know about LL changing their prices, but the result at the retail end is sometimes surprising.

I just got the LL Proto2000 0-6-0 mail order from Montreal for CAN$199.99. My LHS is selling for CAN$249.99. What the source of the discrepancy is, I don't know, but $50 is $50 (plus taxes...)

Andrew